The reality of working in an understaffed supermarket

The shelves might be empty because, workers say, there aren’t enough people to keep filling them. Photo / The Spinoff, Getty
Originally published by The Spinoff.
Woolworths staff have been striking – and one workplace issue they want addressed is understaffing. The Spinoff talks to one supermarket worker about the impact.
In 2022, Owen* was watching the news with his wife. There was a story about staff shortages at supermarkets. “I can help them out,” he remembers thinking. The 65-year-old applied for a job at his local Woolworths supermarket in the central North Island. It was the end of the Covid years, when supermarket workers had been thanked for their hard, vital work to ensure people continued to have access to food in the middle of lockdowns.
Two years later, the goodwill towards supermarket workers seems to have dissipated, although complaints about their employers, New Zealand’s two major supermarket chains, persist. “Supply chain shortages” used to explain empty shelves are less frequent too. Meanwhile, Owen is still working at the supermarket, and he still sees empty shelves and hears complaints from frustrated customers. He now has a contract to work two days a week, but often ends up doing much more. Why? Chronic understaffing, he says.
“We’re always short. People come back too early after being sick, they’re tired, they’re weary, they’ve been asked to fill a shift and they do it anyway,” Owen says. Often, customers ask him why shelves are empty: he wants to explain to them staff are exasperated too, but he doesn’t have time, because there are pallets to unload.
In May, First Union, which represents supermarket workers, surveyed 1500 of them and 39% identified understaffing as “the single most important workplace issue”. The result was more pronounced among Woolworths employees. 90% of respondents said their stores were understaffed “sometimes”, “regularly” or “continuously”.
“Understaffing creates huge problems on a day-to-day basis, people are scrambling to fill gaps – it’s an enormous stress,” says Kaye Hearfield, a union organiser with First. The union has described current understaffing as “unsafe” due to the pressure it places on workers. “People end up with health issues – I hear all the time about people taking time off due to stress,” Hearfield says.
Staff loyalty helps. “There’s a faithfulness to the cause,” Owen says. He really likes and trusts his manager: when he gets a text from her asking if he can come in on his day off, he’s usually willing to. “I know that if [she] asks, they’re desperate,” he says.
One consistent issue at Owen’s store is that the work assigned to “night fill” – people who unload pallets and load empty shelves – doesn’t always get done. While his job is stocking shelves, he often comes in in the mornings to find still-full pallets out the back, and the shelves in his area of the store empty. “It’s become normal for me to work a full week because it hasn’t been done on night fill.” In his perception, this is partly because of a lack of a consistent manager at nighttime, meaning no one chases workers if they don’t show up. He says he regularly hears of the same thing happening at other stores, too – some stores are so low on workers that they keep asking staff to do extra hours and try to second people from other supermarkets.
Understaffing is one aspect of ongoing negotiation between First Union and Woolworths. Earlier this month, industrial action took place around the country, with workers wearing strike stickers and not complying with company social media procedures.
When asked to provide a comment on understaffing for this story, a Woolworths spokesperson said, “We are currently in active negotiations with First Union and we don’t feel it’s consistent with good-faith bargaining to discuss individual issues in the media. However, we do want to stress our $45 million investment in safer stores announced in August last year, which includes team safety cameras in all stores, trolley locks, fog cannons and double-entry gates.”
Owen says he feels lucky he has a partner with a non-supermarket job and other sources of income that most of his colleagues don’t have, such as a share portfolio he inherited. “I wouldn’t buy Woolworths shares now I’ve worked here – I don’t like the way they treat people,” he says. He’s been told by higher-level management the displays of food and drink in the beer and wine section, where he mainly works, need to be tidier. “They’re not aware that the reason it looks like that is that there isn’t enough room to put it in the chiller,” he says. “We’re only just keeping up with the work.”
This top-down approach is demoralising, he says. “There’s fun and enjoyment in talking to the customers – I love Gold Card Tuesday, when all these lonely old people come out of the woodwork and want to talk to someone. But it’s always, always normal for me to have a big pile of stuff that isn’t done.”
Hearfield, from First Union, says the union is “trying to convince [Woolworths] we need more people on the ground”. The investment in safety equipment for staff is one thing, but in her perspective, simply having more people at stores would improve both safety and morale. “There are people at work feeling distraught, not coping, not wanting to come into work because they don’t know what they will walk into,” she says.
Woolworths could start, she suggests, by establishing clear guidelines and benchmarks for acceptable levels of staffing at each store. “If Woolworths wants to provide good customer service, you can only do that if you have enough people.”
* Not his real name.